#3: Working With Instagram Influencers

You might know by now that my favorite way of marketing any business is with getting your work featured in front of other people’s audiences.

Traditionally, this is where you get your products featured in magazines, on big websites, and more recently you can do the same process in conjunction of social media.

Instead of trying to pitch your products and try to land them in magazines, on websites or on someone’s blog, how about you pitch yourself to someone who has a large following on social media.

This is something I almost always recommend to for my students or my clients to do, but the number one question that usually comes up when they start the process is “How do you know it’s a big enough influencer?”

Unfortunately, I can’t give you a magic number and tell you how many followers someone has to have. It’s a relative number.

If let’s say you have an audience of a thousand people for your business, you generally don’t want to work with someone that has the same or smaller following than you.

If you find someone that has two thousand followers then you probably want to give that a chance and try working with them. Does that mean you will get a lot out of working with them? That’s a totally different question.

If you have a thousand followers and someone has two thousand followers, you benefit from gaining exposure to an audience that is twice the size of your current audience.

The thing is, two thousand followers is not large enough to convert into any meaningful sales.

The standard e-commerce conversion rate is about 1%. That means if you want to make one sale every day, you need to have 100 people visiting your website every day.

Two thousand people who you get exposure to will not convert into 100 people visiting your site.

The other number you have to pay attention to is engagement.

How engaged is this influencer’s following? If the influencer doesn’t have a highly engaging following, that means that very few of their actual followers are seeing their posts.

If you pitch yourself to someone who has 100 thousand followers it might sound very cool (especially when they say yes) but your future could fall flat if they have a very low engagement rate.

If out of 100 thousand followers they only get 100 likes and comments on every post, you are ultimately not getting your products seen by enough people.

Getting your products featured, whether it’s by an influencer or a magazine is a fairly easy process when you know how to do it. It’s a very nuanced process that most people don’t get right. I’m want to cover a few of the top reasons I see people failing with influencer marketing.

People don’t target the right type of accounts

You need to have a very clear understanding of who your ideal customers are and you need to get really specific. If you’re pitching to someone who talks about all sorts of things and whose style appears to be very generic, you’re not going to get a lot of traction from them.

People often work with influencers who have a lot of followers but very little engagement. As I mentioned before, engagement is a much better metric to gauge how many eyeballs will see your feature.

When the influencer doesn’t feature your product in the best way

If you sell jewelry for example and there is a lot of fine detail in your work, you don’t want the influencer to be wearing the jewelry and taking a photo because all of that detail will be lost. It would probably be a pretty wide shot and it wouldn’t be close enough for someone to admire and appreciate what makes it so special.

This happens a lot with my Tiny Hands products, but if I send my product to an influencer and they wear the jewelry it doesn’t translate as well as if they just took a close up shot of their necklaces, rings or bracelets. If it just sits in the packaging or their desk and they’re taking a macro shot, that tends to do much better for me.

The influencer and you need to work pretty closely on how to make the feature be the best that it can be.

You don’t write your pitches in a way that is engaging and addresses the influencer in a way that tells them what’s in it for them

If you’re writing your email pitch in a way that says “Hey, I’m this jewelry artist and I do this kind of work and I think your audience will love my products. I think this would be really great for my business.” If you come from a very “me me me” approach it’s not going to work out and it’s very off putting. This might sound like common sense, but a lot of people make this mistake. Writing an email pitch can be very strategic, so you really need to pay attention to how you’re writing them.

Once you’re found an email template or have written it in a way gets results, you can basically copy and paste it and reuse it. Obviously, don’t copy and paste it word for word, you want to make some changes to address that specific influencer.

When it comes to influencer marketing, unfortunately not all features will bring you sales.

What I want you to take away from this is don’t get too attached to one particular person that you’re pitching to.

I’ve certainly fallen into the trap of finding and influencer and thinking “Oh my goodness, she’s just perfect! She totally matches my brand and her audience will just eat up my jewelry! (No pun intended)”

And then not hearing from her even after following up or if she say no, it can hurt. That’s just part of the process, but most importantly don’t give up.

Now that you know that not all features will bring you sales, and this is true not just for influencer marketing but also when you get featured in a magazine. I have been featured in national glossy magazines that is sold in all Target stores and I’ve gotten zero sales before.

Once you’re managed your expectations and you know that not all features will bring you sales, that will at least help you with your emotions so you don’t feel too hurt or disappointed if the feature doesn’t pan out or bring you any sales.

Don’t think it doesn’t work, because I’ve been featured in places that got me tens of thousands of sales in a matter of a few weeks. It’s definitely possible, it’s what grew Tiny Hands, and I stand by this form of marketing and I highly encourage that you start doing it for your business as well.

If you want to learn more how to pitch your products to anyone, I recommend you go to In The Limelight.

If you sign up for the wait list you get enrolled in a free e-course that teaches you how to pitch your products.

Thank you for listening!

Thanks for hanging out with me today! If you have any thoughts, ideas or feedback, feel free to leave a comment below.

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I'm Mei ('may') from Minneapolis. I want to help you build a sustainable, profitable handmade business that makes you consistent income and sales. I only ever teach or recommend marketing, social media, pricing, production and branding tips that I've personally used in my own handmade business and that I know work. Read More…